The Merman's Children (6 page)

“I hoped…” she breathed at last, “I hoped…“

He shoved her arms away, stood back, glared, and hefted the spear. “Where is my sister?” he snapped.

“Oh. She is—is well, Tauno. None will harm her. None would dare.” Ingeborg tried to draw him from the door. “Come, my unhappy dear, sit, have a stoup, be at ease with me.”

“First they reaved from her everything that was her life——”

Tauno must stop anew to cough. Ingeborg took the word. “It had to be,” she said. “Christian folk could not let her dwell unchristened among them. You can't blame them, not even the priests. A higher might than theirs has been in this.” She shrugged, with her oft-seen one-sided grin. “For the price of her past, and of growing old, ugly, dead in less than a hundred years, she gains eternity in Paradise. You may live a long while, but when you die you'll be done, a blown-out candle flame. Myself, I'll live beyond my body, most likely in Hell. Which of us three is the luckiest?”

Still grim but somewhat calmed, Tauno leaned his weapon and sat down on the dais. The straw ticking rustled beneath him. The peat fire sputtered with small blue and yellow dancers; its smoke would have been pleasant if less thick. Shadows crouched in corners and under the roof, and leaped about, misshapen, on the log walls. The cold and dankness did not trouble him, unclad though he was. Ingeborg shivered where she stood.

He peered at her through the murk. “I know that much,” he said. “There's a young fellow in the hamlet that they hope to make a priest of. So he could tell my sister Eyjan about it when she found him alone.” His chuckle rattled. “She says he's not bad to lie with, save that the open air gives him sneezing fits.” Harshly again: “Well, if that's the way the world swims, naught can we do but give room. However…yestre'en Kennin and I went in search of Yria, to make sure she wasn't being mistreated. Ugh, the mud and filth in those wallows you call streets! Up and down we went, to every house, yes, to church and graveyard. We had not spied her from afar, do you see, not for days. And we'd have known were she inside anything, be it cabin or coffin. She may be mortal now, our little Yria, but her body is still half her father's, and that last night on the strand it had not lost its smell like daylit waves.” Fist thudded on knee. “Kennin and Eyjan raged, would have stormed shore and asked at harpoon point. I told them we'd only risk death, and how can the dead help Yria? Yet it was hard to wait till sunset, when I knew you'd be here, Ingeborg.”

She sat down against him, an arm around his waist, a hand on his thigh, cheek on shoulder. “I know,” she said most softly.

He remained unbending. “Well? What's happened, then?”

“Why, the provost took her off with him to Viborg town——Wait! No harm is meant. How could they dare harm a chalice of Heavenly grace?” Ingeborg said that matter-of-factly, and afterward she fleered. “You've come to the right place, Tauno. The provost had a scribe with him, and that one was here and I asked him about any plans for keeping our miracle fed. They're not unkindly in Als, I told him, but neither are they rich. She has no more yarns to spin from undersea for their pleasure. Who wants a girl that must be taught afresh like a babe? Who wants a foster-daughter to find a dowry for? Oh, she could get something—pauper's work, marriage to a deckhand, or that which I chose—but was this right for a miracle? The cleric said no, nor was it intended. They would bring her back with them and put her in Asmild Cloister near Viborg.”

“What's that?” Tauno inquired.

Ingeborg did her best to explain. In the end she could say: “They'll house Margrete and teach her. When she's of the right age, she'll take her vows. Then she'll live there in purity, no doubt widely reverenced, till she dies, no doubt in an odor of sanctity. Or do you believe that the corpse of a saint does not stink as yours and mine will?”

Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “But this is frightful!”

“Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.”

His eyes stabbed at hers. “Would you?”

“Well…no.”

“Locked among walls for all her days; shorn, heavily clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither what God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time——”

“Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.”

“Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You too—in your heart—not so?—whether or not you've said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”

“Margrete may think otherwise.”

“Mar—aah. Yria.” He brooded a while, chin on fist, lips taut, breathing noisily in the smoke. “Well,” he said, “if that is what she truly wants, so be it. Yet how can we know? How can
she
know? Will they let her imagine anything is real and right beyond their gloomy cloi—cloister? I would not see my little sister cheated, Ingeborg.”

“You sent her ashore because you would not see her eaten by eels. Now what choice is there?”

“None?”

The despair of him who had always been strong was like a knife to her. “My dear, my dear.” She held him close. But instead of tears, the old fisher hardheadedness rose in her.

“One thing among men opens every road save to Heaven,” she said, “and that it does not necessarily bar. Money.”

A word in the mer-tongue burst from him. “Go on!” he said in Danish, and clutched her arm with bruising fingers.

“To put it simplest: gold,” Ingeborg told him, not trying to break free. “Or whatever can be exchanged for gold, though the metal itself is best. See you, if she had a fortune, she could live where she wished—given enough, at the King's court, or in some foreign land richer than Denmark. She'd command servants, men-at-arms, warehouses, broad acres. She could take her pick among suitors. Then, if she chose to leave this and return to the nuns, that would be a free choice.”

“My folk had gold! We can dig it out of the ruins!”

“How much?”

There was more talk. The sea people had never thought to weigh up what was only a metal to them, too soft for most uses however handsome and unrusting it might be.

At the end, Ingeborg shook her head. “Too scant, I fear,” she sighed. “In the ordinary course of things, plenty. This is different. Here Asmild Cloister and Viborg Cathedral have a living miracle. She'll draw pilgrims from everywhere. The Church is her guardian in law, and won't let her go to a lay family for your few cups and plates.”

“What's needed, then?”

“A whopping sum. Thousands of marks. See you, some must be bribed. Others, who can't be bought, must be won over by grand gifts to the Church. And then enough must be left for Margrete to be wealthy Thousands of marks.”

“What weight?”
Tauno fairly yelled, with a merman's curse.

“I—I—how shall I, fisherman's orphan and widow, who never held one mark at a time in this fist, how shall I guess?…A boatful? Yes, I think a boatload would do.”

“A boatload!” Tauno sagged back. “And we have not even a boat.”

Ingeborg smiled sadly and ran fingers along his arm. “No man wins every game,” she murmured. “You've done what you could. Let your sister spend threescore years in denying her flesh, and afterward forever in unfolding her soul. She may remember us, when you are dust and I am burning.”

Tauno shook his head. His eyelids squinched together. “No…she bears the same blood as I…it's not a restful blood…she's shy and gentle, but she was born to the freedom of the world's wide seas…if holiness curdles in her, during a lifetime among whisker-chinned crones, what of her chances at Heaven?”

“I know not, I know not.”

“An unforced choice, at least. To buy it, a boatload of gold. A couple of wretched tons, to buy Yria's welfare.”

“Tons! Why—I hadn't thought—less than that, surely. A few hundred pounds ought to be ample.” Eagerness touched Ingeborg. “Do you suppose you could find that much?”

“Hm…wait. Wait. Let me hark back——” Tauno sat bolt upright. “Yes!” he shouted. “I do know!”

“Where? How?”

With the mercury quickness of Faerie, he became a planner. “Long ago was a city of men on an island in midocean,” he said, not loud but shiveringly, while he stared into the shadows. “Great it was, and gorged with riches. Its god was a kraken. They cast down weighted offerings to him—treasure, that he cared not about, but with it kine, horses, condemned evildoers; and these the kraken could eat. He need not snatch aught else than a whale now and then—or a ship, to devour its crew, and over the centuries he and his priests had learned the signals which told him that such-and-such vessels were unwanted at Averom…So the kraken grew sluggish, and appeared not for generations of men; nor was there any need, since outsiders dared no longer attack.

“In time the islanders themselves came to doubt he was more than a fable. Meanwhile a new folk had arisen on the mainland. Their traders came, bearing not goods alone, but gods who didn't want costly sacrifices. The people of Averorn flocked to these new gods. The temple of the kraken stood empty, its fires burned out, its priests died and were not replaced. Finally the king of the city ordered an end to the rites that kept him fed.

“After one year, dreadful in his hunger, the kraken rose from the sea bottom; and he sank the harbored ships, and his arms reached inland to knock down toers and pluck forth prey. Belike he also had power over quake and volcano—for the island was whelmed, it foundered and is forgotten by all humankind.”

“Why, that is wonderful!” Ingeborg clapped her hands, not thinking at once of the small children who had gone down with the city. “Oh, I'm so glad!”

“It's not that wonderful,” Tauno said. “The merfolk remember Averorn because the kraken lairs there yet. They give it a wide berth.”

“I—I see. You must, though, bear some hope if you——”

“Yes. Worth trying. Look you, woman: Men cannot go undersea. Merfolk have no ships, nor metal weapons that don't soon corrode away. Never have the races worked together. If they did—maybe——”

Ingeborg was a long time quiet before she said, almost not to be heard, “And maybe you'd be slain.”

“Yes, yes. What is that? Everybody's born fey. My people stand close—they must—and a single life is of no high account among us. How could I range off to the ends of the world, knowing I had not done what I might for my little sister Yria who looks like my mother?” Tauno gnawed his lip. “But the ship, how to get the ship and crew?”

They talked back and forth, she trying to steer him from his course, he growing more set in it. At last she gave in. “I may be able to show you what you want,” she said.

“What? How?”

“You understand the fishing craft of Als are too cockleshell for what you have in mind. Nor could you hire a ship from a respectable owner, you being soulless and your venture being mad. However, there is a cog, not large but still a cog, that works out of Hadsund, the town some miles hence at the end of Manager Fjord. I go to Hadsund on market days, and thus have come to know her men. She's a cargo tramp, has fared as widely north as Finland, east as Wendland, west as Iceland. In such outlying parts, the crew have not been above a bit of piracy when it looked safe. They're a gang of ruffians, and their skipper, the owner, is the worst. He came of a good family near Herning, but his father chose the wrong side in the strife between kings' sons, and thus Herr Ranild Grib has nothing left to him besides this ship. And he swears bitterly at the Hansa, whose fleets are pushing him out of what business he could formerly get.

“It may be he's desperate enough to league with you.”

Tauno considered. “Maybe,” he said. “Um-m-m…we merfolk are not wont to betray and kill our own kind, as men with souls are. I can fight; I would not fear to meet anyone with any weapon or none; still, where it comes to haggling and to being wary of a shipmate, that might be hard for us three siblings.”

“I know,” Ingeborg said. “Best I go along, to dicker and keep an eye open on your behalf.”

He started. “Would you indeed?” After a moment: “You shall have a full share in the booty, dear friend. You too shall be free.”

“If we live; otherwise, what matter? But Tauno, Tauno, think not I offer this out of lust for wealth——”

“I must speak with Eyjan and Kennin, of course—we must plan—we must talk further with you—nonetheless——”

“Indeed, Tauno, indeed, indeed. Tomorrow, forever, you shall have what you will from me. Tonight, though, I ask one thing, that you stop this fretting, cast off that veil which covers your eyes, and let us be only Tauno and Ingeborg. See, I've drawn off my gown for you.”

VII

W
HEN
the black cog
Herning
stood out of Mariager Fjord, she caught a wind that filled her sail and sent her northward at a good clip. On deck, Tauno, Eyjan, and Kennin shed the human clothes—foul, enclosing rags!—that had disguised them during their days of chaffer with Ranild Espensen Grib. A lickerish shout lifted from six of the eight men, at sight of Eyjan white in the sunlight, clad only in dagger belt and tossing bronze mane. They were a shaggy, flea-bitten lot, those men, scarred from fights, their leather jackets, wadmal shirts and breeks ripe with old grease stains.

The seventh was a lad of eighteen winters, Niels Jonsen. He had come to Hadsund a couple of years before, seeking deckhand work to help care for widowed mother and younger siblings on a tiny tenant farm. Not long ago, the ship whereon he served had been wrecked—by God's mercy without loss of life—and he could get no other new berth than this. He was a good-looking boy, slender, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, with straightforwardly shaped fresh features. Now he blinked away tears. “How beautiful she is,” he whispered.